Lamorne Morris Archives

Review: ‘The Disappearance of Toby Blackwood,’ starring Joe Ahern, Luke Dalton, Doug Mellard, Dana DeLorenzo, Natasha Hall and Todd Giebenhain

December 22, 2022

by Carla Hay

“The Disappearance of Toby Blackwood”

Directed by Joe Ahern

Culture Representation: Taking place somewhere on the West Coast of the United States in 2020, the comedy film “The Disappearance of Toby Blackwood” features a predominantly white cast of characters (with a few African Americans and Latinos) representing the working-class and middle-class.

Culture Clash: During the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns, a man decides to distract himself by searching for a former schoolmate who has become a semi-famous “doomsday” conspiracy theorist and who has disappeared during the pandemic.

Culture Audience: “The Disappearance of Toby Blackwood” will appeal primarily to people who don’t mind watching boring and idiotic comedies that use a deadly pandemic for cheap and unfunny jokes.

Cast members in “The Disappearance of Toby Blackwood,” Pictured in top row, from left to right: Joe Ahern, Ashley Spillers and Arjay Smith. Pictured in bottom row, from left to right: Annie Karstens, Eddie Alfano and Grant Harvey. (Photo courtesy of Freestyle Digital Media)

“The Disappearance of Toby Blackwood” is yet another unimaginative and repetitive movie with a COVID-19 theme. Viewers are stuck with the vapid and obnoxious characters, just like these characters are stuck quarantining and use it as an excuse to be stupid. This poorly made comedy is only 74 minutes long, but it feels like longer. There’s barely enough of a story to fill a short film, which is why it’s a chore to watch all of “The Disappearance of Toby Blackwood.”

“The Disappearance of Toby Blackwood” is an independently financed film that you can tell was made by frequently unemployed actors who decided to give themselves jobs by making a terrible movie. It explains why the director and co-writers of this dreadful dud have cast themselves as stars in the movie. “The Disappearance of Toby Blackwood” director Joe Ahern gets the most screen time as the film’s protagonist: a lackluster, middle-aged sad sack named Wes Crowley. Ahern co-wrote the movie’s atrocious screenplay with Doug Mellard, who plays the completely irritating Toby Blackwood.

Watching the misguided Ahern and Mellard as these two cretinous characters is like watching the polar opposite reasons why actors fail in their roles. Ahern is very listless and flat, while Mellard over-acts. “The Disappearance of Toby Blackwood” also commits one of the worst sins of a movie with a COVID-19 pandemic lockdown theme: It’s mostly a series of very insipid and increasingly annoying phone calls and videoconference chats.

The gist of this very limp story (which takes place somewhere on the West Coast of the U.S. in 2020) is that Wes is bored at home while quarantining during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns, so he and a few friends decide to find out what happened to Wes’ former schoolmate Toby, who has recently disappeared. Wes and Toby haven’t seen each other in about 20 years, but Wes knows that Toby has become a semi-famous “doomsday” conspiracy theorist. It’s mentioned early on in the film that Toby has 200,000 Twitter followers and 130,000 YouTube subscribers.

There’s a subplot about Wes being bitter because his wife Courtney (played by Natasha Hall) has left him and taken their dog Iggy Pup with her. Courtney also served divorce papers to Wes, in case it wasn’t clear that their marriage is over. Courtney left the dog bowl behind, and Wes whines in an early scene in the movie: “I don’t have the heart to throw it away, so I just stare at it all day.”

Throughout the movie, Wes does video chats with five of his closest friends: Luke Dalton (played by Grant Harvey), Carrie (played by Annie Karstens), Wendy (played by Ashley Spillers), Mike (played by Eddie Alfano) and Keith (played by Arjay Smith). Luke is the loudmouth jerk of the group, so you know he’s going to get the most screen time. Keith is the only one in this group who comes close to sounding like he’s the voice of reason, so course he gets the least screen time out of these five pals.

Luke is actually the one who comes up with the idea to look for Toby. Luke persuades a reluctant Wes to start an investigation, and eventually Wes becomes more interested in finding out what happened to Toby. It should be noted that Luke and Wes also drink a lot of beer during their investigation shenanigans, which might explain why their judgment is impaired but doesn’t explain why this movie is so horrendous.

“The Disappearance of Toby Blackwood” wastes a lot of time showing Luke and Wes talking to various people (usually Toby’s mentally ill followers), who have various theories about why Toby has gone missing. None of the theories is even remotely close to being amusing. “The Disappearance of Toby Blackwood” is filled with a lot of drab dialogue, such as this comment that Wes says that’s supposed to make viewers laugh: “Between my divorce, the quarantine and these bizarre conspiracy theories, I think I’ve aged 10 years in three days.”

A few fairly well-known actors make cameos as these weirdo followers of Toby. The cast members making quick appearances in this embarrassing movie include Simon Pegg, as a paranoid fan named Garth Arthur, who rambles on about alternate realities. Other actors portraying fans of Toby include Lamorne Morris as Gerald Meacham and Luis Guzmán as Chester Mendoza, who both have babbling, forgettable lines of dialogue. All it proves is that the filmmakers called in some favors to get these well-established actors to be in this awful movie.

Why hasn’t anyone contacted the police to report Toby missing? It’s explained early on in the movie that Wes and Luke don’t want to contact the police because Toby has enough guns (many probably illegal) to arm a militia, and they don’t want Toby to get in trouble with law enforcement. Why hasn’t anyone contacted Toby’s family members? Wes and Luke don’t want to alarm these relatives because Toby hasn’t officially been reported missing, and no one knows yet if Toby voluntarily disappeared, or if there was foul play involved.

“The Disappearance of Toby Blackwood” is just a tedious slog of these witless conversations. A low point is a segment showing terribly stereotypical depictions of Italian Americans: The brother characters of Vinny Balducci (played by Joseph Russo) and Paul Balducci (played by Jeremy Luke), who are in their 30s, talk about a grudge involving a murder and veal scallopini (don’t ask), as if they’re Super Mario Bros. wannabe mafia types. Other not-funny-at-all segments show a urine filtration device salesperson named Larry the Urine Guy (played by Rick Gomez) and an unhinged priest named Father Delgado (played by Rudy Mungaray).

A conspiracy fanatic named Mandy Prescott (played by Dana DeLorenzo), who says that she is Toby’s girlfriend, insists that Toby went to meet Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates at Area 51, because Toby thinks Gates created the COVID-19 pandemic so that Gates could put microchips in COVID vaccines. The movie also over-uses a so-called “joke” that some of Toby’s fans, including one named Gilbert Muldoon (played by Todd Giebenhain), think Area 51 is really located underneath the Denver International Airport. Don’t expect there to be any hidden cleverness to this “joke.” There is none.

Interspersed with these stale and vacuous conversations are scenes showing some of Toby’s conspiracy theory videos, so this movie’s viewers can see what type of garbage content he’s been spewing out into the world. There’s nothing original about what Toby says or does when he rants about government spying and “end of the world” predictions. “The Disappearance of Toby Blackwood” presents everything as a weak and uninteresting parody of real-life conspiracy theorists. All of the footage with Toby will just make viewers wish that Toby would stay permanently missing so that he stays far away from humanity. If you care about being entertained, you’re better off staying far away from “The Disappearance of Toby Blackwood.”

Freestyle Digital Media released “The Disappearance of Toby Blackwood” on digital and VOD on December 20, 2022.

Review: ‘Death of a Telemarketer,’ starring Lamorne Morris and Jackie Earle Haley

March 3, 2022

by Carla Hay

“Death of a Telemarketer”

Directed by Khaled Ridgeway

Culture Representation: Taking place in California’s San Fernando Valley, the comedic film “Death of a Telemarketer” features a cast of African American and white characters (with a few Latinos and Asians) representing the working-class and middle-class.

Culture Clash: An overly ambitious telemarketer is held hostage by a man who’s angry about the lies the telemarketer told to try and get a sale.

Culture Audience: “Death of a Telemarketer” will appeal primarily to people who don’t mind watching idiotic and boring comedies.

Gwen Gottlieb and Lamorne Morris in “Death of a Telemarketer” (Photo courtesy of Vertical Entertainment)

How bad is “Death of a Telemarketer,” a movie that’s trying to pass itself off as an edgy comedy? The only real “death” in this garbage movie is any hope that watching this film will be an enjoyable experience. It’s excruciatingly horrible, with comedy that’s not funny and filled with extremely annoying characters.

Written and directed by Khaled Ridgeway, “Death of a Telemarketer” does everything wrong in a movie that’s supposed to be a comedy. The jokes are terrible. The pacing is dull. The scenarios are mind-numbingly stupid. The acting is substandard. And there’s barely anyone to root for in this moronic film.

The movie’s central character is Kasey Miller (played by Lamorne Morris), a cocky and unscrupulous telemarketer who has ambitions to be the top sales employee at Telewin!, the company where he works in California’s San Fernando Valley. He works in a call center, and his job is selling phone/cable TV/Internet packages to people, even if they don’t really want or need them. Like a lot of shady telemarketers, Kasey will do whatever it takes, including lie to people, in order to get the sale.

One day, a Telewin! supervisor named Liz Carson (played by Gwen Gottlieb) announces to the call center’s telemarketers that there will be a contest where the top-selling telemarketer will get $3,000 as a prize bonus. There will be a penalty for any telemarketer who gets a caller asking to be put on the Do Not Call list. Predictably, Kasey thinks he can easily win this contest.

Kasey has some competition from a religious co-worker named Barry (played by Woody McClain), who thinks he can get sales through more ethical means than the tactics that Kasey uses. There’s a considerable amount of time wasted on the rivalry between Kasey and Barry, which leads to a lot of painfully unfunny jokes. Kasey uses some bizarre tactics for closing a sale, including promising free Rick James wigs (styled to look like the cornrows that the singer wore in the 1980s) to customers who agree to buy what Kasey is selling. The promise of free Rick James wigs is used as a stupid gag later in the movie.

Kasey can get so outlandish in his sales calls that one of his calls is recorded and put on YouTube as an example of how telemarketers can be scammers. The video goes viral. And when supervisor Liz finds out and calls Kasey into her office, Kasey thinks he might get reprimanded or worse. Instead, Liz praises him because this viral video showed how Kasey made a sale by being relentless. She’s so impressed with Kasey that she tells everyone that they should emulate his unethical way of selling, which she calls the Kasey Method.

In a movie that’s polluted with unimaginative clichés, the protagonist is successful at his job but unsuccessful in love. Kasey is trying to win back his ex-girlfriend Christine (played by Alisha Wainwright), who works at a hair salon and is studying to get her master’s degree in psychology. One day, Kasey shows up at the hair salon with a bunch of roses, which he hands out to the customers to try to impress Christine. She reluctantly agrees to go to dinner with him.

During conversations between Kasey and Christine, it’s eventually revealed that Kasey dropped out of law school and is drifting, when it comes to his career. Because of Kasey’s aimless direction in life, he’s become estranged from his father. Christine is paying her own tuition for grad school, and reveals that Kasey has a privileged background when she says about her tuition, “Unlike you, I don’t have a father footing the bill.”

Christine isn’t too happy about the fact that she hasn’t met all of Kasey’s family. He doesn’t want her to meet his father. She also doesn’t like it when he treats her like a sales customer. Those are some of the hints that the movie drops to show why Christine broke up with Kasey. But even without those hints, it’s easy to see why the relationship didn’t work: Kasey is a selfish twit.

Something happens during the contest at work that propels Kasey to want to go to extremes to be considered the company’s top salesperson. One evening, when he’s supposed to meet Christine for dinner, he postpones the date so that he can stop by the office while everyone has left. Kasey has decided to call people who are on the Do Not Call list to try to sell them what they refused before.

One of the people he calls is Asa Ellenbogen (played by Jackie Earle Haley), an elderly man whom Kasey has targeted because he thinks old people are especially gullible to telemarketers. Before he made the call, Kasey looked up Asa on Facebook and pretends to be a friend of Asa’s named Phil French. Asa and Phil used to be in the same marching band when they were in high school.

Kasey impersonates Phil on the phone and asks Asa to buy this Telewin! phone/cable TV/Internet package as a favor. Asa mentions that his son Dean (played by Haley Joel Osment) needs a job, so Asa asks “Phil” if he can get Dean a job at the company. Of course, “Phil” lies and says yes. Kasey thinks the scam call is going well until Asa angrily announces that the real Phil French is dead. And through a series of circumstances, Asa shows up at the office and takes Kasey hostage as revenge.

This hostage storyline of “Death of a Telemarketer” doesn’t happen until the last third of the movie. What should have been the funniest part of the film is a tedious slog that just has a lot of yelling. It just makes all the characters more irritating.

The acting in the movie ranges from over-the-top silly to dreadfully boring. All of the dialogue is simply horrendous. “Death of a Telemarketer” is so ill-conceived, it’s mind-boggling that this time-wasting junk got financing. There might or might not be any death in this movie, but watching it feels like an assault on viewers’ time and intelligence.

Vertical Entertainment and Sony Pictures Entertainment released “Death of a Telemarketer” in select U.S. cinemas, on digital and VOD on December 3, 2021.

Review: ‘How It Ends’ (2021), starring Zoe Lister-Jones and Cailee Spaeny

July 21, 2021

by Carla Hay

Zoe Lister-Jones and Cailee Spaeny in “How It Ends” (Photo courtesy of MGM/American International Pictures)

“How It Ends” (2021)

Directed by Zoe Lister-Jones and Daryl Wein

Culture Representation: Taking place in Los Angeles, the comedy film “How It Ends” features a predominantly white cast of characters (with a few African Americans and Asians) representing the middle-class.

Culture Clash: Hours before an impending apocalypse, a woman in her 30s sees a physical manifestation of her 15-year-old self, and together they visit people they know to say their goodbyes in case they don’t survive the apocalypse.

Culture Audience: “How It Ends” will appeal primarily to people who are interested in “mumblecore” comedies that are self-consciously quirky in a way that will annoy some viewers.

The smugly oddball “How It Ends” looks and sounds like it could have been a pilot episode for a mumblecore sitcom rather than a compelling cinematic experience. In this time-wasting apocalyptic comedy, the end of the world is depicted as Los Angeles hipsters and weirdos acting as annoying as possible and thinking that they’re hilarious. You can see that on Hollywood Boulevard for free. You don’t need to pay money to see that in a movie as dull as this one.

Husband-and-wife duo Zoe Lister-Jones and Daryl Wein wrote and directed “How It Ends,” and it looks exactly like what it is: A movie that was rushed into production during the pre-vaccine COVID-19 pandemic, just so the filmmakers could brag about how they braved the pandemic to make this movie. Unfortunately, not enough time seems to have been spent on developing an interesting story for this repetitive and mostly empty-headed film.

“How It Ends” takes place in Los Angeles, just hours before an apocalypse is supposed to destroy the world. It’s never explained how people know the exact hour that this apocalypse is going to hit. But the characters in this movie are just way too calm about it, and they go about their lives as if it’s just another sunny day in California.

At least half of this movie just shows the two main characters walking from house to house, as they say goodbye to friends and assorted loved ones before the end of the world happens. Expect to see repetitive shots of people sauntering down a street as if they’re just out for a pleasant stroll before the apocalypse. And everyone they talk to just happens to be “quirky.”

The two main characters in the story are supposed to be the same person at different stages in her life. The movie opens with protagonist Liza (played by Lister-Jones), who’s in her 30s and with an unknown occupation, in her home on the morning before the apocalypse. There’s a teenage girl (played by Cailee Spaeny) jumping up and down on Liza’s bed.

Liza checks her voice messages and finds out that her friend Mandy (played by Whitney Cummings) has invited Liza to an end-of-the-world party happening that night. Liza tells the teenage girl, “Tonight, I want to get really fucking high and eat ’til I puke.” The girl in Liza’s house replies, “I can list so many problems with that idea. The first is: You’re out of weed.”

Who is this girl? Liza finds out this other person in her home is her 15-year-old self. Liza might want to roll on Ecstasy to get high, but the only thing rolling during this movie will be viewers’ eyes at the self-consciously twee absurdity of it all. Guess who’s hanging out with Liza for the whole movie? Young Liza, who’s somehow wiser and more emotionally intuitive than the older Liza.

It’s explained in the movie that Young Liza can only be seen on the last day before the apocalypse happens. And based on the advice that Young Liza gives her older self, Young Liza is supposed to embody hindsight. Young Liza also doesn’t have the emotional baggage that older Liza has, so she’s able to see things more clearly when it comes to unresolved issues in older Liza’s life.

Before Liza and her younger self go to the party, they decide to visit a series of people to say their final goodbyes. A lot of these half-baked scenes (many of them look improvised) are just filler. There are long stretches of the movie where it’s nothing but Liza and her younger self walking from place to place and encountering goofy, strange and usually very irritating people.

Wait, doesn’t everyone drive in Los Angeles if they can afford it? The movie comes up with a reason for why Liza and her teenage mini-me end up walking everywhere for more than half the movie: Liza’s car has been stolen. It’s the end of the world, so there’s no point in reporting the theft to the police. Will Liza get her car back though? That question is answered in the movie.

Most of the people whom Liza and her young self visit are the type of characters you would expect in a low-budget indie flick where the filmmakers think that it’s automatically supposed to be funny to see adults acting like immature kooks. There are the wacky neighbors in different homes, such as Derek (played by Bobby Lee), who’s a babbling stoner; Manny (played by Fred Armisen), a forgetful eccentric; and anxious Dave (played by Paul Scheer), who gets yelled at by another neighbor for not washing his recycling container.

And then there are a few people randomly performing in the middle of the street or on a sidewalk in this residential area, including a nameless stand-up comedian (played by Ayo Edebiri), who’s actually one of the few highlights of the film. Real-life singer Sharon Van Etten shows up toward the end of the film as a folksy singer named Jet, who plays acoustic guitar in the street to an enthralled audience of two: Liza and her younger self.

“How It Ends” desperately wants to be a uniquely modern film, but it uses the oldest and most cliché trope in a comedy starring a woman: She’s pining over a man because she wants him to be her romantic partner. In Liza’s case, “the one who got away” is Nate (played by Logan Marshall-Green), a former hookup whom she has deeper feelings for than she was willing to admit when he was in her life and when she emotionally pushed him away. Liza regrets shutting Nate out of her life, and she wants to see Nate again so she can tell him that she loves him before the end of the world happens.

Liza also has some unfinished business with her divorced parents Kenny (played by Bradley Whitford) and Lucinda (played by Helen Hunt), as well as her ex-boyfriend Larry (played by Lamorne Morris), who cheated on her when they were together. Liza visits all of them during this movie to tell them how she really feels. Viewers find out that she has major abandonment issues and has had a problem communicating her true feelings to the people who are closest to her.

But the best and funniest encounter that Liza has is with an estranged friend named Alay (played by Olivia Wilde), who’s just as neurotic as Liza is. Liza and Alay have a rapid-fire conversation where they talk over each other about what went wrong in their friendship (they fell out because Alay didn’t approve of Larry), and they call a truce—because of, you know, the apocalypse.

Alay eats a very decadent-looking cake during this conversation and says she’s a psychic. What does she see in Liza’s afterlife future? Alay says, “Timothée Chalamet and lots of dairy with no consequences.” Sounds like heaven for a lot of people.

If only “How It Ends” had more of this type of laugh-out-loud comedic scene with Wilde and Lister-Jones, because they have such natural and appealing chemistry with each other. Maybe they can co-star in another movie someday. Hopefully, it would have a better screenplay and more exciting direction than what’s in “How It Ends.”

But for every scene like the rip-roaring one with Wilde, there are five or six more scenes in “How It Ends” that are just so tedious and downright cringeworthy. For example, when Liza goes to her ex-boyfriend Larry’s home, it’s a retro ripoff with derivative ideas: She holds up a boombox (just like John Cusack famously did in the 1989 movie “Say Anything”), and then she quotes the chorus of Alanis Morissette’s 1995 hit “You Oughta Know.”

And there’s some self-pitying drivel, such as when Liza and her younger self have an argument with each other. Liza wants to ditch her younger self and continue on her own, because she thinks Young Liza doesn’t count as her real self. Young Liza shouts, “I do count! All your life, you’ve been licking your fucking wounds, when I’m the biggest wound of all!” Oh, boo hoo. Did anyone bring any tissues?

Lister-Jones and Spaeny previously worked together in the disappointing 2020 horror film “The Craft: Legacy,” which was written and directed by Lister-Jones and starred Spaeny as a teenage witch who joins a coven of other teen witches. The chemistry between Lister-Jones and Spaeny in “How It Ends” is more like older sister/younger sister as two different people, rather than entirely convincing as two versions of the same person. One of the takeaways from the movie is that Liza looks physically older than her younger self, but she hasn’t emotionally matured very much since she was a teenager.

Spaeny makes some attempt to mimic certain mannerisms that older Liza would have had in her teen years. And there are times that Liza and her younger self do things in snyc when they’re walking down the street. However, the movie looks like it was filmed so quickly that Spaeny and Lister-Jones didn’t have enough time to do work on body language and speech patterns that are more subtle and nuanced.

“How It Ends” is not so off-putting that it won’t find its share of people who will love this movie. There’s a very specific type of viewer who automatically thinks any movie that reeks of being self-congratulatory “quirky” is something that’s worth admiring. But for people who prefer their comedies to actually be funny and have a significant plot, you’ll have to look elsewhere, because “How It Ends” comes up very short in these elements and is mostly just a series of poorly conceived vignettes.

MGM’s American International Pictures released “How It Ends” in select U.S. cinemas, on digital and VOD on July 20, 2021.

Review: ‘Desperados,’ starring Nasim Pedrad, Lamorne Morris, Anna Camp, Sarah Burns, Robbie Amell and Heather Graham

July 3, 2020

by Carla Hay

“Desperados”

Directed by LP

Culture Representation: Taking place in Los Angeles and Mexico, the romantic comedy “Desperados” features a racially diverse cast (white, African American, Latino) representing the middle-class.

Culture Clash: A desperate-to-be-married woman is convinced her new boyfriend will break up with her after sending him a hateful email over a misunderstanding, so she enlists two of her female friends to go with her to Mexico, where he’s on vacation, in order to delete the email before he sees it.

Culture Audience: “Desperados” will appeal primarily to people who like predictable and often unrealistic romantic comedies.

Nasim Pedrad and Lamorne Morris in “Desperados” (Photo by Cate Cameron/Netflix)

As long as the messy and very fake reality TV franchise “The Bachelor” continues to attract millions of viewers, there will always be a big-enough audience for messy and very fake romantic comedies like “Desperados.” This movie is as formulaic and predictable as you might expect. But worst of all, “Desperados” wants to pretend that it’s feminist and edgy, when it’s really not. “Desperados”—directed by LP (the work alias for Lauren Palmigiano) and written by Ellen Rapaport—might have all the appearances of a contemporary film. But at its core, the film’s message about how women should act and how women should be rewarded when looking for love is as old-fashioned as a Doris Day movie.

In “Desperados,” the central character is Wesley “Wes” Darya (played by Nasim Pedrad), a divorced, childless woman in her late 30s who’s living in Los Angeles and experiencing an early mid-life crisis. After ditching a career in corporate finance, Wes has decided to become a high-school guidance counselor. She’s been struggling to find a job (mostly because she ruins her interviews by being a vulgar motormouth), and she’s having a hard time paying her bills. Things have gotten so bad for Wes that when she gets an occasional babysitting job from a friend, she steals food from the family’s refrigerator.

Wes’ love life isn’t going so well either, since she isn’t seeing anyone special, and her recent dates have been duds. Wes also has a serious case of social-media envy, since she’s obsessed with comparing her life to the seemingly wonderful lives of her friends and other peers. Wes is also starting to feel her biological clock ticking, since she’s contemplating freezing her eggs when she has the money to do that procedure.

Wes’ two best friends—Brooke Barnes (played by Anna Camp) and Kaylie Mills (played by Sarah Burns)—are the same age as Wes. Brooke and her husband have a baby son together. Kaylie and her husband have been unsuccessfully trying to conceive a child. Wes envies Brooke and Kaylie, just because Brooke and Kaylie are married and don’t seem to have any money problems.

One day, while Wes and Kaylie are over at Brooke’s place, Wes begins complaining about her life. They advise her that it’s not healthy to compare her life to other people’s lives on social media, because people always hide their problems. Brooke tells Wes that marriage isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, while Kaylie says that infertility can put a big strain on a relationship where two people desperately want to have a child. But Wes doesn’t want to hear about how her two best friends feel about their marriages. In Wes’ mind, she’s gotten the rawest deal out of the three of them, because she has no man, no job and no children.

Something that sets Wes over the edge while she wallows in self-pity is hearing that her ex-husband Erik has gotten engaged. Wes finds out when Erik leaves her a voicemail message to tell her the news. And by the way, as Erik says in his message, he and his fiancée are featured in a romantic photo spread in the latest issue of Brides magazine. Of course, Wes rushes to a magazine stand to look at the article, and her jealousy goes into overdrive when she finds out that Erik’s fiancée is younger, prettier and more accomplished than Wes is.

Wes is even more desperate to find a new man, now that she knows her ex-husband is getting married. Wes goes on a blind date that was set up by a mutual friend. The friend (whose name is Tad and who’s never seen in the movie) has set Wes up with a widower named Sean McGuire (played by Lamorne Morris), who texts and calls her in a friendly conversation before the date. (Jason Mitchell was originally cast in the Sean McGuire role, before he was fired in 2019 over a #MeToo scandal on the Showtime series “The Chi,” and he lost other jobs as a result.) Sean and Wes agree that if their blind date goes badly for either of them, they should use the code word “no” to end the date right there, with no hard feelings.

Wes’ date with Sean at a casual restaurant starts off pretty well—until she starts blabbering about how all of her friends have great jobs and great relationships and that her ex-husband is getting married. At this point in her life, Wes is old enough to know that sounding like a whiny and jealous shrew is not the way to make a good impression on a first date. But she’s so self-absorbed that she doesn’t realize that she’s turning off Sean, until he tells her the code word “no.”

At first, Wes doesn’t understand that Sean wants to end the date. But when she finally realizes that he’s done with the date and wants to leave, she rips into him about how hard her life is and how hard it is to find a good man in Los Angeles. Okay, well, that rant is just going to confirm that he made the right decision to end the date. Sean is a gentleman, and he lets Wes leave in a huff.

As an angry Wes storms out of the restaurant, she trips on one of the steps and falls flat on her face. And lo and behold, she’s helped up by a handsome stranger named Jared Sterling (played by Robbie Amell), who invites her over to his place that night. And when Wes gets a look at Jared’s home, it’s obvious that Jared is doing very well financially.

Wes is flustered, partly because Jared seems like her dream man, but also because her fall outside the restaurant has left her a little dazed. She half-jokingly tells Jared that her brain might not be working correctly because of the fall. And he responds by telling her that it’s okay, because he doesn’t want her to think too hard—as in, he doesn’t want her to be too smart for him. This demeaning comment would be a red flag to any self-respecting person, but Wes is too dazzled by Jared’s good looks and apparent wealth to notice that he wants a dumb, submissive girlfriend who’ll go along with whatever he wants.

Wes makes the same mistake that many women do in banal romantic comedies like this one: She pretends to be someone she’s not in order to “get the guy.” Wes pretends to like the same things that Jared does, which is shown in a montage that’s kind of cringeworthy and not very funny. Wes and Jared eventually become lovers, and the first time they have sex together, she’s already imagining them married with children.

Shortly after they’ve started sleeping together, Jared suddenly “ghosts” Wes. And, of course, after she calls and texts and still doesn’t hear from Jared, she assumes that this is his way of breaking up with her. Once again, Wes goes on a “poor me” diatribe about her love life when she’s hanging out with Brooke and Kaylie. In a drunken rage, Wes decides to send a hateful email to Jared from her laptop, by calling him all kinds of names and even mentioning his dead father as a way to hurt Jared. Brooke and Kaylie get caught up in it too, and they help Wes write some other things in the hate mail.

Wes has been stealing Wi-Fi service from a neighbor, so sending the email takes longer than expected. While Brooke and Kaylie oversee the laptop to send the email, Wes gets a phone call and takes the call in another room. The caller is Jared, who is calling from a hospital in Mexico. It turns out he’s been in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, where he got into a terrible car accident and was in a coma for several days.

When she realizes that this is the reason why she didn’t hear from Jared, Wes frantically tries to stop Brooke and Kaylie from sending the email before it’s too late. But, of course, it is too late. The email was already sent.

Wes is terrified that Jared will read the email and break up with her. She rejects the idea of sending a follow-up apology email, because she doesn’t want Jared to get any hint that she’s a psycho you-know-what. And so, because Jared mentioned that because of the car accident, all of his belongings (including his phone) are still at his hotel in Cabo San Lucas, Wes comes up with the extremely dumb idea of going to Mexico to find Jared’s cell phone, hack into it, and delete the email before he can see it. Jared is expected to be discharged from the hospital in a few days, so of course there’s a “race against time” to find his phone.

Brooke, who is the most cautious and level-headed of the three friends, thinks it’s a bad idea. Kaylie, who’s the type of friend who believes that a Mexican shaman can help her become fertile, thinks it’s a great idea. Ultimately, Brooke is convinced to go on the trip because she thinks it’s a good excuse to go on a vacation to Mexico.

And so, off the three friends go with no real plan to find and hack into Jared’s phone, except for Wes’ vague notion that they can walk around the resort where he’s staying and keep calling his phone, in the hope that they’ll hear his ringtone somewhere in this big resort. Never mind that they have no idea what room he’s staying at in the resort. (Hotels don’t give out that information for privacy reasons.)

You know exactly how this movie is going to end as soon as (surprise, surprise) Wes sees that Sean is staying at the exact same resort too. Before the inevitable happens, there are some repetitive pedophilia jokes involving an adolescent boy named Nolan Ryan Phillippe (played by Toby Grey), who’s about 12 or 13 years old, and staying with his protective mother Debbie (played by Jessica Chaffin) at the resort. Nolan develops a crush on Wes, who (through a series of slapstick circumstances to get to Jared’s room) ends up in the same room as Nolan wearing nothing but a towel, and Debbie catches Wes with her precious little boy.

It doesn’t help that Debbie’s horrified first impression of Wes was when Wes arrived at the resort, and Wes’ vibrator accidentally dropped out of her purse in front of Nolan. Of course, Nolan picked up the vibrator and asked his mother what kind of toy it is. This type of vibrator joke has been done before in so many other movies (such as in 2019’s “Good Boys”) that it’s an example of how unoriginal and uninspired “Desperados” is in when it comes to sight gags.

Heather Graham has a small role in the movie as Angel de la Paz, the “healer” whom Kaylie has hired to give her guidance about her fertility issues. The way this scene ends is very predictable, considering that Angel makes it obvious with her touchy-feely ways that she’s more interested in spending time with Brooke than she is with Kaylie. And the resort’s native Mexican workers Ramon (played by Rodrigo Franco) and Quintano (played by Izzy Diaz) are vaguely written characters that are treated as gullible idiots by the self-centered Wes when she needs to con or trick them into doing something for her.

Although Pedrad is a charismatic comedian in other projects, she’s saddled with playing a loathsome, less-than-smart character in “Desperados.” The derivative screenwriting is difficult to overcome for any actors looking to do something unique with their roles in this movie. Morris’ Sean character is literally the straight man to Wes’ insufferable antics, and he doesn’t have much to do, except to play the “nice guy,” who’s a lot more patient with Wes than he should be. (Pedrad and Morris played love interests in the sitcom “New Girl,” so at least they look comfortable working together.) The rest of the cast members are serviceable in their roles, with no particular standouts.

The main character in a romantic comedy doesn’t have to be “likable,” but audiences should expect the character to be believable. The reason why Wes (and most of this movie) is a big emotional fraud is because she tries to act like she’s an independent woman who can think and do things for herself, when the whole story revolves around her thinking that her life will be “ruined,” based on one angry email that she wrote to a boyfriend. This is how teenagers feel, not women in their 30s who are supposed to be emotionally mature.

In fact, almost everything that Wes does is based on what she wants other people to think about her, not what will actually make her happy. Later in the film, Sean does a big favor for Wes that causes a significant change in her life, but she couldn’t even accomplish that change on her own. The essential message of “Desperados” is that Wes needs a man to “rescue” her. It’s a very outdated mindset for a movie that tries to pass itself off as “modern” or “feminist.”

“Desperados” throws in a lot of cursing and raunchy humor to make it look like it isn’t mawkish and sentimental. But in the end, this often-dull movie is just as sappy and unrealistic as the trite romantic comedies that are on the Hallmark Channel.

Netflix premiered “Desperados” on July 3, 2020

Review: ‘Bloodshot’ (2020), starring Vin Diesel

March 13, 2020

by Carla Hay

Vin Diesel in “Bloodshot” (Photo by Graham Bartholomew/Columbia Pictures)

“Bloodshot” (2020)

Directed by David S. F. Wilson

Culture Representation: Taking place in various cities around the world, the sci-fi/action flick “Bloodshot” has a racially diverse cast (white, black, Asian and Latino) and a story that revolves around a U.S. military soldier who’s brought back from the dead, as well as the current and former members of a secret high-tech organization that’s experimenting on him to make him into an easily manipulated killing machine.

Culture Clash: Certain characters in the story have ethical dilemmas about using technology to train assassins.

Culture Audience: “Bloodshot” will appeal primarily to fans of star Vin Diesel and the comic-book series on which the movie is based, but the movie’s formulaic tropes will have little interest to people who aren’t die-hard fans of action movies.

Guy Pearce and Vin Diesel in “Bloodshot” (Photo by Graham Bartholomew/Columbia Pictures)

Vin Diesel is best known for starring in the wildly successful car-racing “Fast and Furious” franchise since 2001, when the first “The Fast and the Furious” movie made him famous. Ever since then, he’s starred in multiple action movies that were clearly made with the hopes that they too would become blockbuster franchises with a series of several movies, but none outside of “The Fast and the Furious” and “XXX” (pronounced “triple X”) has panned out to be that way.

The sci-fi/action flick “Bloodshot” (based on the Valiant Comics series) is another attempt by Diesel (who’s one of the movie’s producers) to try and create a movie-franchise vehicle for himself, and this attempt will also fail. Although “Bloodshot” is a passably enjoyable film, the movie doesn’t have the charisma to make it the type of film where audiences will demand any sequels. This personality deficit in the movie has largely do with the fact that Diesel is a very robotic actor, which is no surprise to anyone who’s seen most of his films.

“Bloodshot” begins with a montage of Diesel’s Ray Garrison character on active duty as a U.S. Marines soldier. He saves a man from a hostage situation and ends up at Ariano Air Force Base in Italy, where he gets praise for his rescue mission. All of this globetrotting away from home has put a strain on his marriage to his British wife Gina (played by Talulah Riley), who’s an action-flick cliché of being the hero’s modelesque love interest who (of course) gets half-naked in the movie. Gina comments to Ray about his soldier duties, “At some point, your body can’t do this forever,” in what is supposed to pass as deep, meaningful insight in her dialogue.

Sure enough, Ray does get killed. But how he gets killed might or might not have happened in the way people might think it happened, since the movie plays tricks on characters’ minds about what’s real and what isn’t. What does happen on screen is that Ray is ambushed and kidnapped by two men in his bathroom. The next thing Ray knows, he’s tied to a chair in a slaughterhouse, where he undergoes a brutal interrogation about information that he swears that he doesn’t know.

Ray’s tormenter/interrogator in this kidnapping is Martin Axe (played by Toby Kebbell), who’s clearly unhinged because he starts dancing to the Talking Heads’ “Psycho Killer” before showing that Gina has been kidnapped and tied up too. And then Gina gets murdered in front of Ray.

As viewers soon see, the entire tragic scene was an elaborate virtual-reality manipulation that later will be used on Ray, who is dead in real life and being experimented on by a secret American high-tech organization called Rising Spirit Technologies (RST), led by the overly ambitious mad scientist Dr. Emil Harting (played by Guy Pearce). Dr. Harting wants to perfect a technology that can resurrect soldiers from the dead and train them to be assassins with superpowers. He plans to sell this technology to the highest bidder, and he expects to make billions. (This isn’t spoiler information, since this concept of reanimating Ray from the dead is in the movie’s trailer and it’s the origin story in the “Bloodshot” comics.)

Ray finds out that he’s been brought back from the dead when Dr. Harting shows Ray how Ray has undergone a blood transfusion that has replaced Ray’s blood with a plasma-like liquid filled with molecular creatures that can quickly rebuild his body in any way after getting injuries or wounds, thereby making Ray virtually indestructible. The visual effects for “Bloodshot” are actually quite good, but they won’t be winning any awards.

Ray is the first person that RST has been able to bring back to life, according to what Dr. Harting says. Dr. Harting also says that no family members claimed Ray after Ray’s death, so that’s why Ray’s body ended up at RST. Ray’s memory has been erased, so he has no way to know if Dr. Harting is telling him the truth, and he’s trapped in the facility anyway. In order to ease Ray’s fears, Dr. Harting puts a positive spin on the situation by telling Ray that Ray now has a second chance at life. What he doesn’t tell Ray is that Ray is being used by RST to see if Ray can be turned into an easily programmable killing machine.

At RST, Ray meets three people who are also part of RST’s experiments: Katie, nicknamed KT (played by Eiza González), is someone whose respiratory system has been restored into something high-tech that can be controlled by Dr. Harting. Jimmy Dalton (played by Sam Heughan) is Dr. Harting’s most loyal foot soldier (literally), since his legs have been replaced by super-speedy mechanical limbs. Jimmy has other high-tech abilities that are revealed later in the story. Tibbs (played by Alex Hernandez), the quietest of the three, has ocular prosthetics that give him a superhuman ability to see.

What viewers see but what Ray doesn’t is that RST can create virtual worlds in Ray’s mind and erase his memories to start over and implant other ideas in his mind whenever they want. And what Dr. Harting wants to do in this phase of the experiment is to see if he can get Ray to complete a series of assassinations around the world, by tricking Ray into thinking that each of the men he assassinates is the same man who murdered Gina in front of Ray.

In order to do that, RST has to erase Ray’s memories every time he completes an assassination and start over by replacing Gina’s murder re-enactment with a different image of each man as the murderer, who will then be the target of Ray’s revenge assassination. And who are these men that Ray is supposed to kill? And why does Dr. Harting want them killed? Those details are revealed in the movie.

Meanwhile, KT gets a little closer to Ray, and there are hints that she’s attracted to him and wants a better life than the one she’s trapped in at RST. There’s also a fast-talking coding whiz named Wilfred Wigans (played by Lamorne Morris), a Brit who’s the comic relief in the movie. Wigans has a self-deprecating sense of humor that shows he’s aware that he’s a nerd who gets disrespected, but he’s determined to have the last laugh. Wigans is the only character in the movie who seems to have a personality that goes beyond two dimensions.

Most people who want to see “Bloodshot” will be interested in the action sequences. And some of these scenes are thrilling, particularly the movie’s best action scene, which takes place on a skyscraper. But the assassination scenes are very formulaic, especially since there are video games that have upped the ante and people’s expectations for this type of action.

In this age of Marvel Studios’ domination of superhero flicks, movie audiences are now expecting a lot more from superhero movies than what “Bloodshot” delivers, because the movie version of “Bloodshot” is a story that’s on the same quality level as a video game. “Bloodshot” director David S. F. Wilson (who co-wrote the movie’s screenplay with Eric Heisserer) should have kept in mind while making this film that today’s movie audiences want genuine and relatable character development in superhero movies, not just impressive visual effects. Wilson, who makes his feature-film directorial debut with “Bloodshot,” has a visual-effects background in mostly video games, including several “Star Wars” video game titles.

As the ruthless and greedy Dr. Harting, Pearce does a reasonably good job with his character, but he’s already played a memorable mad scientist in a superhero movie before—Aldrich Killian in 2013’s “Iron Man 3.” Since “Iron Man 3” was a much better movie than “Bloodshot,” the latter movie seems like an inferior retread for Pearce, and the Harting character doesn’t have the wounded emotional depth that Killian had.

And in the role of KT, González does a serviceable performance that, quite frankly, could have been played by any number of actresses. Huegan’s soulless Jimmy Dalton character is strictly a one-dimensional role where he has single-minded loyalty to RST and some jealousy toward Ray, who’s being groomed as RST’s alpha male experiment. And as the quiet Tibbs, Hernandez doesn’t have much to do with this character, who’s basically there to just follow Jimmy’s lead.

In order for a superhero movie to go from a one-picture deal to a series franchise, audiences have to want to come back for more because of the personalities of the main characters. In that respect, “Bloodshot” falls woefully short, because as the center of the story and as the titular superhero, Diesel’s acting is almost as artificially lifeless as Ray Garrison/Bloodshot.

Columbia Pictures released “Bloodshot” in U.S. cinemas on March 13, 2020.

UPDATE: Because of the widespread coronavirus-related closures of movie theaters worldwide, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment has moved up the digital and VOD release of “Bloodshot” to March 24, 2020.